Samantha Power Quotes

The strategies and assumptions [of the propaganda model] are fundamentally contrary to a democratic model.... The goal of the propaganda model is simply to achieve efficient indoctrination, and it therefore tends to regard the assumptions of the democratic model as inconvenient obstacles to efficient communication.

All the people who might oppose the regime have been absolutely silenced. The central idea behind it is to make the rising generation worship their chief and get ready to "save civilization" from the Jews, from Communism and from democracy -- thus preparing the way for a Nazified world where all freedom of the individual, of education, and of the churches is to be totally suppressed.

When demagogues and dictators ban art, this is the reason: art is the great solvent of obedient fundamentalism.

Many Communist government officials have a rigid, dictatorial power, but they live in constant suspicion and fear of anything that might undermine the power they have.

'The End of America' details the 10 steps that would-be dictators always take in seeking to close an open society; it argued that the Bush administration had been advancing each one.

Ideas are dangerous; and the traffic in them has been the concern of all dictators.

To a certain extent, all dictatorships are alike. From Stalin's Soviet Union to Mao's China, from Ceauşescu's Romania to Saddam Hussein's Iraq, all these regimes had the same trappings ... But Kim Il-sung took the cult of personality to a new level. What distinguished him in the rogues' gallery of twentieth-century dictators was his ability to harness the power of faith. Kim Il-sung understood the power of religion.

Political dictatorships take possession not just of money and belongings but of narrative.

The Soviet system of propaganda and censorship existed not so much for the purpose of spreading a particular message as for the purpose of making learning impossible, replacing facts with mush, and handing the faceless state a monopoly on defining an ever-shifting reality.

Clarity of language is the first casualty of authoritarianism.

The control of information is something the elite always does, particularly in a despotic form of government. Information, knowledge, is power. If you can control information, you can control people.

Calls for the simplification of abstract or allusive art have always come from governments suspicious of artists themselves. This is why totalitarian regimes have always legislated some form of realism.

Textbooks are Soviet propaganda.

They have been talking about a dictatorship and they were right because there's a dictatorship and there's a government that has been fighting that dictatorship, the dictatorship of the media.

Totalitarianism is patriotism institutionalized.

In the Soviet Union it was illegal to take a photograph of a train station. Look what happened to them. They tried to classify everything.

Literature has its own life, even in a dictatorship like the Soviet Union.

I've always been fascinated by totalitarian regimes. I'm not an admirer of them.

To be a member of the Communist Party is to have a taste of the police state. It is a diluted taste but is bitter and unforgettable.

Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the '30s, East Germany in the '50s, Czechoslovakia in the '60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the '70s, China in the '80s and '90s - all dictatorships and would-be dictators target newspapers and journalists.

The worst thing our Communists could do to us, and the thing we have most to fear from their activities, is that we should become like them.

Nondemocratic regimes imperil the security of the world. They stay in power by controlling their populations. This control invariably requires an increasing amount of repression. To justify this repression and maintain internal stability, external enemies must be manufactured.

There is no real public opinion in Communist countries. They are ruled by an oligarchy.

Dictators have only become impossible through the invention of the microphone.

A dictator ... must fool all the people all the time and there's only one way to do that, he must also fool himself.